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Jonathan Weissman’s team watched cancer cells spread over the doomed mouse. Designed with a bioluminescent enzyme, they first appeared in scans as a small navy blue diamond lodged near the heart; a week later, like a flared triangle on the mouse’s upper body, with streaks of green and two distinct bright red centers of activity. By day 54, the mouse looked like a lava lamp.
The pictures would have been familiar to any cancer biologist, but they didn’t tell you much about what was going on: why the cancer was metastasizing or what cells were responsible for it. For this, Weissman’s team had designed a new tool. Inside the original navy blue diamond, they had designed the microbiological equivalent of an airplane’s black box – a “molecular recorder” that, after the mouse died, could allow them to extract the cells. and to put together intimate images of the rise of a single cancer.
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